Theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the au...
His book Choosing the Right Pond, economist Robert Frank exposes just how much of social life is determined by our desire to be big fish in our own ponds. If there were only one pond—if everyone compa...
When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their li...
What Seligman and his colleagues proposed was that when people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from wh...
This phenomenon is called the endowment effect. Once something is given to you, it’s yours. Once it becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss. And,...
The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility.
The fact that counterfactual thinking seems to hone in on the controllable aspects of a situation only increases the chances that a person will experience regret when engaging in counterfactual thinki...
So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one’s autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.
So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you’ve had your first cup of coffee—you’ve made a dozen choices or more. But they don’t count, really, as choices. You could have done othe...
Seligman’s discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don’t have control.
One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.
Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when...
Most of us think about empathy as a feeling or an emotion. It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able...
Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for good enough; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas;...
In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.
In a recent survey, 93 percent of teenage girls surveyed said that shopping was their favorite activity. Mature women also say they like shopping, but working women say that shopping is a hassle, as d...
If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.
Identity is much less a thing people inherit than it used to be.
Even though we don’t expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.